Unannounced Mango Features Flood In After Developer Tools Release

After the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta was released yesterday, we expected nothing less than for both developers and aficionados alike to get their hands on the emulator and find unannounced features. Yes, first of all the developer tools beta does state it is Windows Phone 7.1, but that’s only temporary, Windows Phone 7.5 is the codenamed Mango update coming later this year. It’s easy to figure out that the developer tools are tagged at 7.1 because they do not contain everything from final build (7.5). Regardless, the Internet is buzzing with plenty of other features that have been discovered both via the developer tools emulator, and hands-on time after the event that took place yesterday. With the May 24th event come and gone, the Mango goodness continues:

There will be “new ways for us to do multi-player” in the Games Hub (more information coming later this year)

The folks over at xda-developers have been peeling back the developer tools (7.1) emulator and listing all their findings that haven’t been announced yet either. Of course, their list is being populated as they find new features, hopefully we will be able to keep up with our own list of Mango features. Be sure to check out our list to keep updated and fresh on all the features! As Mango approaches, hopefully Microsoft will give everyone an entire list of the over 500 features they have stated will be included in the update.

Music Hub:

You can create and save playlists

There’s a “related artists” and bio under the artist tab, great for discovering music

You can’t “heart” songs (at least in the emulator)

Bing & Maps:

You can show traffic on maps

It’s now possible to scroll the mini-map while the text directions are on-screen

Bing Audio recognizes music and clicking on the result will take you to the Zune Marketplace

You can now unlock the phone using the search button, apparently

If you search for something on Bing that has an application equivalent it will show you a link to the application within Bing

The “my location” icon now has the same colour as the OS theme

Keyboard:

Now corrects short word misspellings such as ar -> at, fir-> for and br-> be

Now corrects it if you press a letter instead of space between two words e.g. it will suggest “I’m about” if you type imnabout or imnaboit, and will suggest “How are you” if you type “hownarebyou”

Also corrects common misspellings like Profesional -> Professional

Tries to predict next word (as shown at 24th May event), e.g. If you type I, then “tr”, it will suggest “tried”, whereas in WP7 it will suggest nothing